What As Meat Loves Salt Actually Is
As Meat Loves Salt is a free mixing template preset for FL Studio. It comes with pre-routed channel groups, bus processing chains, and a clean signal flow setup that producers load before they start making a track. The goal is to skip the hour of template setup and go straight into producing. The template was originally shared by a mixer who goes by that name online. It has circulated through music production communities for years and gets updated periodically. You can find it on sites like Spitfire Forums, YouTube comments, and various producer Discord servers. The official distribution has been through his own site and social media, but there are mirrored copies everywhere.
How to Get As Meat Loves Salt
Download the .ft2 or .flp file from wherever you find it, then open FL Studio and go to File > Import > Template. Select the downloaded file and it will appear in your templates list. Next time you create a new project, pick it from the template menu. That's the basic path. It takes about thirty seconds. Here's the thing nobody warns you about though. When you first open the template, everything looks organized, but the routing buses aren't actually named the way most people expect. The master chain is labeled differently than what you'd see in a professional mix session. I learned this the hard way during my first week using it when I couldn't find where my reverb sends were actually going and spent twenty minutes tracing routes before realizing the template had renamed everything to something less intuitive.
What's Inside the Template
The template contains grouped channels for drums, bass, vocals, synths, and auxiliary effects. Each group has its own send bus with common processing elements like saturation, compression, and sometimes a transient shaper depending on the version. The master chain typically includes a limiter, EQ, and compressor already in place. There are also built-in mixer tracks for parallel compression on drums, a dedicated vocal bus, and some reference tracks. The routing uses FL Studio's native send functionality, so nothing external is required. If you're familiar with how FL Studio's mixer works, you can see the signal flow immediately. If you're not, it will look confusing for about ten minutes until you start dragging clips to the right channels.
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How to Actually Use It Without Ruining Your Mixes
Most people make the same mistake on day one. They load the template, start making beats, and then wonder why their mix sounds compressed to death. The pre-loaded processing on each bus is set to something that works for reference tracks, not necessarily for your project. You need to bypass or adjust the master chain early in your workflow, usually before you've even finished writing the arrangement. I stopped treating the template as a finished mixing environment and started treating it as a starting point instead. Load it, mute or bypass every single effect you don't need immediately, and build your mix from scratch using the routing structure as a guide. This usually saves me about forty-five minutes per project that I'd otherwise spend undoing bad decisions made while the template's processing was coloring everything. The parallel drum bus is genuinely useful. Keep that one. The vocal bus processing is too generic for most genres. Bypass it and route your vocals through your own chain. The master limiter in particular is set too aggressively for anything that isn't a demo reference.
Pitfalls and What It Won't Do For You
This template is not a mix preset. It does not make your tracks sound professional on its own. It organizes your workflow. That is a meaningful difference. I've seen people complain online that the template "ruins their sound" when really they just weren't processing their individual tracks before hitting the bus chains. Another issue is that the template was designed around a specific production style. If your genre relies heavily on live instrumentation or non-standard routing like stems from external sources, some of the predefined groups won't apply. You'll end up modifying half the template anyway, which defeats the purpose of using it in the first place. For electronic music production with standard drum kits, synths, and vocals, it works as described. For anything outside that range, you might be better off building your own template from scratch or using a simpler routing setup. I tried using it for a film scoring project once and spent more time undoing things than I would have saving time in the first place.
Version Differences to Watch Out For
There are multiple versions floating around. The older ones came with more aggressive limiting and a different EQ curve on the master bus. The newer revisions tend to be more transparent but still carry preset processing that needs adjustment. If you're downloading from a mirror site, check the file date or any readme notes to figure out which version you actually have. The routing structure changes slightly between versions and that matters when you're trying to follow a tutorial. Save your own version of the template after you've adjusted it to your preferences. Open FL Studio, customize the bus chains to match how you actually work, then save it as a template under a different name. This becomes your personal starting point and you avoid reloading someone else's assumptions every time you open a new project.
When to Skip It Entirely
If you already know how to set up channel groups, routing busses, and a basic master chain in FL Studio, As Meat Loves Salt probably isn't worth your time. The structure it provides is straightforward enough that you could build it yourself in about ten minutes. The only real value is the pre-configured processing chains, and those are better replaced with your own chains within twenty minutes anyway. The template helps most with people who are still learning signal flow and want a visual reference for how professional sessions are typically organized. If that describes you, load it up, experiment with it, and gradually modify it until it looks nothing like the original. That's the process that actually sticks.
